Like a lot of entrepreneurs, I'm constantly filled with self-doubt. Will this experiment work? Can I make it a sustainable publication? There aren't that many people who _care_ about WordPress news, let alone care to contribute to it. This is a topic I unpacked in my interview with Kim Coleman on funding a WordPress news website. So many have come and gone in this space -- I can see why. I am grateful, however, when folks like Eric Karkovack step up to become contributors. I'm enjoying his series about the impact WordPress is having on freelancers: Part 1: What does Full Site Editing mean for freelancers? Part 2: Is WordPress pushing freelancers away? (published today) You'll get to hear Eric in today's short interview. If you're interested in becoming a contributor of content, please reach out to me. The Gutenberg Minute Birgit Pauli-Haack shares some Gutenberg updates as well. Here are the important links mentioned: Curated experiences with locking APIs & theme.json #38333 Global Styles: Saving style variations Call for Testing: WordPress Media Italian Japanese Gutenberg Developer Hours 2/22 on Meetup ★ Support this podcast ★

News There have been a lot of people working with the latest 5.9 WordPress release and reporting their successes and failures. Tammie Lister wrote a post about the features in the editor and would like people to quit using the term FSE - Full Site Editing in 2022. The release is not an all-or-nothing proposal yet. Matt Medeiros created a video on the future of page builders with Gutenberg when a discussion on Discord started with Justin Ferriman, a WPMinute producer. Go check out that video to see if you agree with the future of Gutenberg. Anne McCarthy writes about some practical ways to lock your projects for clients and users that can make changes to a WordPress website. The new template locking API  that was released in 5.9 along with newer tools like theme.json continues to be modified to adapt to the user experience.  The WordPress Photo Directory recently hit 1,317 photos and continues to grow. There has been a new Slack Channel created and the team is looking for volunteers and moderators to work on a new site being set up on the make network. The team needs help working through issues in the coming months. So… As we head into the iterative part of Gutenberg’s phase 2, there will be changes for the community of users as they continue to look at WordPress. Josepha Haden Chomphosy writes that the Theory of Technology adoption that will come in three parts. Keep visiting make.wordpress.org to continue to get the latest updates. Security PHP Everywhere, a utility for web developers to be able to use PHP code in pages, posts, the sidebar, or anywhere with a WordPress Gutenberg block has Remote Code Execution vulnerabilities. WordFence reported that there are three critical vulnerabilities in PHP Everywhere all leading to remote code execution in versions of the software below 2.0.3. There was a patched version of the plugin rolled out so if you are using this make sure that you are up to date as soon as possible to keep your WordPress site...well up to date. From Our Contributors and Producers Justin Tadlock over at WPTavern wrote a recent article about the Clarity AdBlocker for WordPress. Ads and upsells have been showing up in WordPress dashboards and many in the community have been complaining about it over the past few years. For many that get that exposure through the WordPress dashboard, this announcement was not well-received (to say the least).  If the default full-screen editing mode and welcome guide in WordPress is annoying when you first visit the edit interface, you can jump over to GitHub to grab the drop-in snippet to disable it. Some may say that PHP is dead (or dying). There is a comprehensive article over at Kinsta that per W3Techs, PHP is used by 78.1% or almost 4 out of 5 websites. PHP seems to be very much alive and faster than before when updated to the latest release. You can go check out this article for the latest benchmarks. Are you one of those people who hate working through your inbox and approach it with dread? There is a new interesting email product called Shortwave that provides a new experience with threads, history, and bundles. You should check it out as an interesting tool to organize your email and provide a nicer experience.  If you are a Beaver Builder Pagebuilder user, it is great to know that they have released a free library of courses. Next up is the Creator Minute from our producers Michelle Frechette and our Simplified Business Minute...Sam Munoz “WP Career Summit” by Michelle Frechette Transcript This is Michelle Frechette with your WP Community minute. April 8 marks the first-ever WordPress Career Summit. Tracks will be dedicated to those looking for jobs and for employers. The job seeker track will include sessions geared toward helping those look for employment with talks about the job search, applying, and interview preparation. The employer track will include sessions around recruiting, onboarding, managing remote teams, and more. Over the last few years, I’ve watched people searching for jobs, and I’ve seen companies posting openings. The job market has been difficult for many. My hope is that a career summit like this will help both sides of the hiring table, while also allowing sponsors to show why you should apply to work for them. Sponsor spots are still open. This is a Post Status event, and I’m the organizer, so reach out if you have any questions. WP Career Summit is free to attend. For more information and to register, visit wpcareersummit.com! “Simplified Business Minute” - Sam Muñoz Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:  Daniel SchutzsmithBirgit Pauli-HaackJoe CasabonaJeff ChandlerDave Rodenbaugh New Members We would like to welcome Thomas Maier  Founder and CEO of Advanced Ads and webgilde GmbH to the WPMinute.  If you haven't noticed, the WPMinute got a fantastic new paint job...more than a paint job...also under the hood. This thing is screaming fast. Thanks to Mike Oliver for designing the new WPMinute theme for us built on Generate Press. If you are looking for somebody that does amazing front-end design and optimization, look no further than WPMinute Producer, Contributor, and web developer Mike Oliver. Thanks to his hard work on the redesign. Thanks to you, dear listener, for tuning in to your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every Wednesday. ★ Support this podcast ★

News Matt Mullenweg, founder and CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, made the news again (this time with the Wall Street Journal). He talks about ‘asynchronous work’ and why he thinks hybrid models will die out.  Automattic employees are already living the work from anywhere model and are able to adjust their work schedules as needed. Anne McCarthy is back with another round of testing this time for the WordPress Photo directory. By adding your photos here, they will automatically appear in Openverse, a search engine for openly licensed media. Volunteers are needed to test and provide feedback on media-related features in WordPress. Anyone is welcome to contribute, and feedback is open until February 23. Eric Karkovac wrote a post on the WordPress photo directory. If you would like an understanding of how licensing images came about and to see an early review of WordPress media go check out his article. From Our Contributors and Producers Many in the WordPress community have been feeling the weight of growth and change and frankly everything over the last couple of years. Cory Miller shared an update on his “crash and burn”. Many of us are not alone in this area and support Cory along with his team over at PostStatus. The organizers of WordCamp Europe 2022, were called out recently for a lack of diversity on the Organizing Team. They are addressing that now citing the team cares deeply about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Click the link to read their updated communication. Angela Jin has started an open discussion on diversity as well over on make.wordpress.org. Make sure to participate in this very important discussion and provide feedback. Eric Mann wrote a post on his first month using WordPress 5.9 from an experienced WordPress contributor perspective. If you would like to see the good, the bad and the future of WordPress this post is worth a few minutes of your time. Sarah Gooding over at the WPTavern covered the latest with the German court fining a website owner for violating the GDPR by using Google-Hosted Fonts. If you are using Google fonts and are subject to European regulations, you may want to review how you are using them to be in compliance. Sarah’s colleague Justin Tadlock wrote an article stating that Block Editor Sidebar Panels are the new Admin Notices. Product marketers will be interwoven with the editing experience for the foreseeable future. Or until an official mechanism for products to notify users of upgrades is offered in core, as WP Minute correspondent Spencer Forman comments. Business news! Convesio Raises $5M in funding to further develop its scalable WordPress Hosting Platform. This funding will help to deliver a consistently fast experience with their customers.  MasterWP.co, a newsletter for WordPress professionals, announced that Howard Development & Consulting has acquired the publication.  From Alex Denning Some news: after 5 years and 249 issues, @BinaryMoon and I have written our final issue of http://MasterWP.co. @howarddcweb have acquired MasterWP, and will be taking over bringing you insightful, quality WordPress news and analysis from next week. Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:  Jeff ChandlerBirgit Pauli-HaackEric Karkovack If you would like to contribute news, especially in the WooCommerce space please find us @thewpminute or use our contact form at thewpminute.com and reach out to us. New Members We would like to welcome our new member this week Lawrence Ladomery from convesio.com. ★ Support this podcast ★

Spencer Forman of WPLaunchify is back to explore the future of the WP stack and how it might impact you as an agency owner or WordPress freelancer. It wasn't too long ago that HTML/CSS and some PHP knowledge was all that you needed to develop moderately advanced sites, now, the future looks a bit different. Will you leverage React, Gutenberg, FSE and all of the new technology in as WordPress advances? Spencer's hopeful for the future of WordPress and shares his opinions in today's episode. Read our related article: What does full site editing mean for WordPress freelancers? ★ Support this podcast ★

News Matt Mullenweg recently announced that he would be personally running Tumblr for a while. Tumblr lost their CEO and Matt is making this his top priority within Automattic for the immediate future. Keep an eye open for improvements in the community. Are you or your clients using Wordpress.com? Wordpress.com is now making it possible to purchase certain plugins directly on the plugin page.  The plugins that are available right now are for WooCommerce subscribers with a Business or eCommerce plan. Keep an eye out for more paid plugins appearing in 2022. Josepha Haden Chomphosy on make.wordpress.org shared the potential release timing for 2022 of WordPress. This release looks like this right now: 6.0 – Late May 6.1 – Mid October If you have project management skills or can lend a hand on these next major releases, contact the release team. The Preliminary Roadmap for Gutenberg 6.0 has also been published by Matias Ventura on make.wordpress.org.  There are four phases outlining the long-term roadmap. Events The schedule of WordCamps is published over on WordCamp central. Many are in the early stages of planning and don't have a date yet. WordCamp US has been scheduled September 9-11, 2022 in San Diego, CA. From Our Contributors and Producers To celebrate Black History Month Underrepresented in Tech will tweet about a black tech innovator/inventor every day in February. Google is burying FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) in its sea of abandoned experiments. Sarah Gooding over at the WPTavern writes that Google’s FLoC ran in limited markets and received overwhelmingly negative feedback from the tech industry that left Google with an uphill battle to get enough buy-in to proceed. So now Google is proposing topics. Stay tuned for the feedback on this new proposal. Squarespace rolled out an expansion of their Member Areas program. This allows publishers to earn money selling instructional and other kinds of content online through private members-only sections of their Squarespace website. Would you like to see block standardization across the web? Joel Spolsky has an interesting blog post asking what if blocks were interchangeable and reusable across the web? He suggests a non-proprietary, block protocol that will be open and free. His article is an interesting one to read. The WPMinute Contributor spotlight is on Aurooba Ahmed this week. She has created a new plugin called the superlist block for WordPress. This is Aurooba’s first publicly released plugin on WordPress.org. The plugin lets you add other blocks within the list items essentially making it supercharged. Listen to Joe Casabona’s Creator Toolkit on Creator Clock Minute Transcript: Hey everybody, Joe Casabona here and you are on the Creator Clock. Over the last few weeks, I've spent a bunch of time putting together what I call creator toolkits. This is based on a podcast I had several years ago, but it's all about tools that you can use to build specific WordPress sites. For example, I have a toolkit for creating online courses or creating a podcast website. So how did I come up with these recommendations? Well, I've been using WordPress for a very long time. I've tried a bunch of tools and I've picked my favorite. So I want to highlight one of these toolkits and it is the creating online courses toolkit. I would recommend Nexcess’ managed WordPress hosting for this because you're going to be accepting payments. The Kadence theme with Kadence Pro is a fantastic theme for this. For the LMS plugin, I recommend LearnDash. LearnDash and Kadence work very well together. For list-building, I recommend ConvertKit, and to tie it all together to everything you use outside of WordPress, I would recommend, Uncanny Automator as the automation plugin. If you want to see more creator toolkits, you can head over to creatorcourses.com/toolkits. Or you can continue the conversation with me over on Twitter @jcasabona. New Members: Thanks to our new member Svilena Peneva from NitroPack.  Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:  Birgit Pauli-HaackMichelle FrechetteDaniel SchutzsmithDavinder Singh KainthJoe CasabonaJeff Chandler Thanks to you, dear listener, for tuning in to your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every Wednesday. ★ Support this podcast ★

We hosted our first WP Minute Live Twitter Space covering learning WordPress. It was Bring Your Own Link (BYOL) style where our guest panelists brought a link to share with the audience. Here were the guests that appeared on the live show: Hauwa Abashiya, Freelance Project Manager transitioning into the WordPress space; Board Member and Volunteer at Big Orange Heart including WordFest and one of the Make Training Team Reps.Joe Casabona, Joe started his career almost 20 years ago as a freelance web developer before realizing his true passion, which is sharing his years of knowledge about website development, podcasting and course creation to help creators, and business owners.Birgit Pauli-Haack,  Birgit is the curator of the Gutenberg Times and co-host of the Gutenberg Changelog podcast with Greg Ziolkowski. Automattic sponsors her work as a full-time developer advocate for WordPress. Daniel Schutzsmith, Web Manager at Pinellas County Government, one of the Producers at The WP Minute, maintainer of WP Livestreams Directory, and soon to be launched WP Developer’s Toolbox.Matt Medeiros, Director by day at Castos.com; Creating community contributed news and journalism at thewpminute.com part of Matt Report media network.  Links shared from the guests Hauwa Abashiya: https://learn.wordpress.org/| https://make.wordpress.org/training/2021/08/08/who-can-learn-help/ | https://learn.wordpress.org/social-learning/Joe Casabona: https://wplearningpaths.com | https://maven.com Birgit Pauli-Haack Gutenberg Developer Hours 2/8 WordPress Social Learning Spaces. https://fullsiteediting.com/block-theme-generator/ Block Theme GeneratorDaniel Schutzsmith: https://make.wordpress.org/training/2022/01/18/training-team-goals-for-2022/ “Especially certification!” Episode transcript [00:00:00] Matt: This event is brought to you by malware and blog vault. Check out mal care.com and blog vault.net, helping you secure and restore your WordPress websites. Quite literally thank them without them. I wouldn’t be able to be doing the WP minute live and Daniel wouldn’t have that nice new gold chain around his neck. [00:00:18] Moving forward. I’d ask all of you to join the link squad, hashtag link squad, producers, and contributors, and the discord server share, vote and discuss their newsworthy links with others. When you’re part of the link squad, you’re part of making weekly word, press news. And we’re talking about one of the, one of the biggest topics, 5.9, and learning a little bit more about 5.9, Daniel, your segments. [00:00:46] Daniel: Yeah. And really what we’re doing here too, for folks that don’t know the w the WP minute is that it’s contributor, sourced news. We provide links basically every week of what we see out there in the industry. And so we often have discussions around those links, similar to what you’d see in a newsroom. [00:01:04] It’s just done a discord. And so we’re, we’re talking with each other and talking about the various things we like about a link or whatnot  [00:01:11] Matt: WVU minute live is bringing you that discussion right here on Twitter spaces and streaming platforms across the internet, someday discuss hashtag link squad topics with us live and follow at the WP minutes. [00:01:23] Stay.  [00:01:25] Daniel: Yeah, given the, the new release of WordPress 5.9, we’re going to focus on this week’s topic, being, learning WordPress. And so everyone’s brought at least one link, perhaps two or three that that share a little bit about learning WordPress. And so we’re going to go through once and we’re going to see how that goes and how long that takes. [00:01:43] But first, let me introduce our folks here. We already know kind of Matt, Modaris our fearless leader here, director by day at dot com. Creating community contributed news and journalism at the WP minutes. Part of the Matt report media network. We also have how ABA Shaya freelance project manager transitioning into the WordPress space, a board member and volunteer at big orange heart, including word Fest, and one of the make training team reps. [00:02:10] Thank you for being here. How all the way from London, I believe. Yep. That’s right. Alright. Joe, Casabona coming straight to us from Pennsylvania. Punxsutawney Phil come up soon. Joe started his career almost 20 years ago as a freelance web developer before realizing his true passion, which is sharing his years of knowledge about website development, podcasting, and course creation to help creators and business owners. [00:02:38] And I’m subscribed to seven of his podcasts. They’re all amazing. So checking out a peer get ball. They have. Beer is the curator of the Gutenberg times and co-host of the Gutenberg changelog podcast with Greg Koski automatic sponsors for work as a full time developer advocate for WordPress[00:03:00]  [00:03:01] and my cell phone, Daniel should Smith, a mild-mannered web manager at Raquel’s Pinellas county government down here in Florida by day. But I’m also one of the producers at the w few minutes and a maintainer of WP live streams directory, which you may have heard me talk about before. And since we launched WP developers toolbox, so let’s get to it. [00:03:23] We’re going to go through each person. They’re going to share a link. We’re going to tweet out that link. So as you’re going along to speakers, let me know if you’ve already tweeted it out and I’ll go into your profile and find it last year. How you’re up first?  [00:03:39] Hauwa: So I’ve just tweeted my now. And of course I have to tweet out the.wordpress.org, because I think it should be the number one tweet that goes out anyway, resource for everybody coming to learn about WordPress. [00:03:53] So if you don’t know about it, it’s a resource that’s been built by the community and we have got lesson plans, workshops, and courses, and we also have social learning spaces on that.  [00:04:11] Daniel: That’s great. And what what kind of things can we find there specifically, like on courses and such as it, is it like Courses around full site editing and things like that, or,  [00:04:20] Hauwa: yeah, so we as part of a 5.9, the training team, so I’m one of the reps on their make training team, along with Courtney Robinson and Pooja discharge. [00:04:31] And we took an undertaking to actually get content out ready for 5.9. First time we’ve done it and, please see that we did get some contacts out there. And one of them has been a course that was done by Roxy and it’s about full site editing. So it’s from a user’s point of view and it’s the first part. [00:04:49] And I believe the second part should be coming out later this month. And we do have a couple of workshops and lesson plans are out there as well, that are like 0.9. [00:04:59] I’m just going to tweet out that actually you said I can only do one thing. Can I have the link to the course? Sure.  [00:05:06] Daniel: We can do  [00:05:09] Matt: more  [00:05:09] Dan...

News WordPress 5.9 - Joséphine was released this week. There is a lot of good stuff to check out on blocks and themes. If you would like an understanding of how this major release with Full Site Editing (FSE) will impact you as a freelancer, you should read Eric Karkovack’s article right here on the WPMinute. You can learn some new features and consider how these changes will fit into your business. While reporting on the updates of 5.9 there was a lot of concern about the Customizer going away with this release. Anne McCarthy explains all you need to know about the new site editor and the Customizer. Go check out her review on YouTube. Sarah Gooding reported over on WPTavern that the WordPress Community Team will relieve volunteers of the burden of COVID 19 enforcement for WordCamps and Meetups scheduled with 50+ attendees. The Guidelines were posted over at make.wordpress.org.   The big picture goals for WordPress 2022 were published on make.wordpress.org. The goals are broad right now and there are many teams which you can join and contribute to. There is still a lot of work to be done so go check out the areas where you can help. Speaking of the future of 2022, WordPress 5.9 sets a strong foundation for so much more for the future of WordPress. There is a post on the  Gutenberg times that paints a picture of the future that this WordPress release provides. There is a table of contents to jump to the areas of immediate interest. Before the dust settles on WordPress 5.9, the roadmap for WordPress 6.0 is published on make.wordpress.org. This is a high-level overview and the aim is to consolidate and expand the set of customization tools introduced in 5.9.  WooCommerce WooCommerce 6.1.1 is available. This release resolves a bug introduced in 6.1.0, rolls back the deprecation introduced in 6.1.0, and improves WooCommerce’s support for WordPress 5.9. Events Post Status is having their first-ever career summit scheduled for April 8, 2022 (9:00am – 5:00pm CDT). The conference is for job-seeking and hiring in WordPress. If you are interested in speaking at this conference you can sign up on the WP Career Summit Site. Join @schutzsmith - Daniel Schutzsmith (January 31st 3pm EST / 8pm UTC) as he hosts WP Minute Live: Learning WordPress. Roundtable guests will be @hauwazhiya - Hauwa Abashiya, @bph - Birgit Pauli-Haack, and @jcasabona - Joe Casabona. From Our Contributors and Producers Helen Hou-Sandi (who many know as the lead developer on the WordPress open-source project) has joined GitHub this week. This is an exciting opportunity for Helen and we wish her the best.  Elementor published their 2021 Wrapup with an impressive statistic of over 10 million active websites.  Lesley Sim wrote a really thoughtful and researched article over on Post Status about WordPress as a Commons. There has been a lot of discussion on Twitter and different Slack channels concerning WordPress since the State of the Word talk this year. This article is worth reading to help frame an open discussion around WordPress - the open-source project. Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:  Birgit Pauli-HaackMichelle FrechetteDavinder Singh KainthAndrew Palmer from Bertha.ai Thank you, dear listener, for tuning in to your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every Wednesday. The WP Minute is an experiment in community journalism for WordPress. If you want to support WPminute, the team, and all of those that contribute – head on over to buymeacoffee.com/mattreport. Buy us a digital coffee for as little as $5 OR better yet! Join our community of WordPress newsies, get access to our Discord server, private podcast, behind the scenes on how the news is made, and get your voice heard on the podcast.  ★ Support this podcast ★

In the News WordPress 5.9 (RC3) is here. 5.9 is slated for next week and you still have time to help with testing. Go over to make.wordpress.org to see how you can still help with this important release. WooCommerce The WooCommerce development team announced that they have started working on an implementation of custom tables for orders. Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern covers the details of how this long-awaited improvement for the custom tables will be developed. The release is scheduled for Q3. You can check out her article for the details. Events The WordCamp Birmingham Organizing Team has unanimously decided to postpone WP Y’all until a future date in April or May when we can safely hold the event for our attendees. Nathan Ingram has a Twitter thread and he will share the updates as they become available. From Our Contributors and Producers Have you started using Blocks in your workflow? Nick Diego forked the core social block and created the Social Sharing Plugin. Justin Tadlock over at WPTavern covers how Nick created the social sharing block by forking the social block from WordPress core 5.9.  Speaking of blocks, Tadlock wrote an article covering Wicked Plugins Block Builder 1.0. (Hey, Vinny’s a producer here at The WP Minute) If you would like to see how Justin created “resource block cards” using the plugin, click the link in the show notes. Do you interact with the WordPress database? The Wizard’s Collection: SQL Recipes for WordPress is an ebook that is available right now. It is a great resource If you need to update your database skills. Would you like to recognize the people that contribute to WordPress? Aurooba Ahmed has made a repo on GitHub to list all WordPress people that can be sponsored on the platform. If you know someone, take a minute to add them to the list.  Andrew Palmer shared a recent interview with Marieke van de Rakt over on the Freemius channel. Marieke, the previous CEO of Yoast shares insights of the acquisition of Yoast to Newfold. Quick tip: It seems like it helps to have a broker and a banker when you need to negotiate. This interview is definitely worth a few minutes of your time. Not exactly WordPress -  but worth mentioning Happy 21st birthday to Drupal.  Wow! Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard for nearly $70 billion.  Remember, less than a year ago Microsoft acquired Bethesda with a loot chest filled with games like: Elder Scrolls, Doom, Fallout, and more.  IMO this frames Microsoft as “Universe Builders.” I wouldn’t be surprised if you saw them competing with Disney on all fronts within a decade. They do open source stuff too, link in the notes. Next up:  The Block Editor Dev Minute w/Aurooba Ahmed The Transcript Hi, this is Aurooba and this is your Block Editor Dev Minute! Here’s a cool feature you should know about: WordPress 5.9 is landing soon and with it, so does block support for multiple stylesheets. If you haven’t already adopted block-specific stylesheets, now is the time. Registering per-block stylesheets means that unnecessary styling is never loaded. This is great for performance and fantastic for maintainability. Being able to add multiple stylesheets per block means you can create more atomic styles. Let’s say you have a custom block that includes a button, instead of creating new styles for the button in this block, you can simply pull in the stylesheet for the regular Button block for consistency and efficiency. I think this is going to be pretty handy. Read more about this and the other fantastic features coming to WordPress 5.9 in the Field Guide on make.wordpress.org. Thanks for listening! The Gutenberg Minute w/ Birgit Pauli-Haack Transcript Happy New Year! My name is Birgit Pauli-Haack. Here is your Gutenberg Minute. Next week, Tuesday, WordPress 5.9 will be released. Theme, plugin developers, and site builders are already testing their products against release candidate 3. 5.9 is the biggest release since the block editor’s debut in WordPress 5.0. As it ties all the pieces, dare I say blocks together into a new and powerful site-building experience. Learn.WordPress.org has a new self-paced course “Simple Site design with Full Site Editing” meant for site builders and owners. You’ll learn how to create a personalized site design without any coding. Shorter workshops are also available: “How to Style Your Site with Global Styles' or How to use the List view”. On the WordPress Social Learning space on Meetup.com, you find dozens of events covering Theme development, Color Styling, and a lot more. If you need to educate users, clients, or meetup members on the latest Gutenberg features, Anne McCarthy has created a list of talking points and resources to learn more for presenters and trainers. Keep up with Gutenberg updates, via the Gutenberg Changelog podcast at gutenbergtimes.com/podcast. Links: Release Candidate 3 WordPress 5.9 https://wordpress.org/news/2022/01/wordpress-5-9-rc3/ Simple Site Design with Full Site Editing https://learn.wordpress.org/course/simple-site-design-with-full-site-editing/ WordPress Social Learning on Meetup https://www.meetup.com/wordpress-social-learning/events/ So you want to talk about full site editing? 5.9 Edition https://nomad.blog/2022/01/15/so-you-want-to-talk-about-full-site-editing-5-9-edition/ Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:  Daniel SchutzsmithVinny MckeeAndrew PalmerJeff ChandlerAurooba AhmedBirgit Pauli-Haack Thank you, dear listener, for tuning in to your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every Wednesday. ★ Support this podcast ★

Welcome back to the WPMinute's Special Edition interviewing our new community lead, Raquel Landefeld. Raquel is the event coordinator at Elegant Themes and will be coordinating content and interviews for the WPMinute. A Little History on Raquel Raquel manages the Meetup Pro Community for Elegant Themes. There are over 50 Divi chapters all over the world. Raquel coaches Meetup organizers on how to human where the emphasis and focus is on human connection. She also helps manage the Elegant Themes Facebook group with over 70K members and coaches the moderators on how to moderate the group with kindness. Raquel discusses how there are rules in the Facebook group to address new users of Divi and where users can be directed for specific help. With so much WordPress news, the challenge is centered around channels supporting independent content on the Discord server for the WPMinute. Matt and Raquel discuss the mission of the WPMinute, how the news is curated and how members interact. The WPMinute brings the human voice from the group presenting in a short form podcast. Raquel shares her great ideas of sharing short video clips and when we can meet in person, hosting a small WPMinute group meeting at a conference. If you want to become a member of the WPMinute and you want to take part in the weekly WordPress news, join our merry band of "WordPress newsies" and chat it up, get yourself mentioned in the newsletter and get credits in the show, become a contributor or producer of the show! ★ Support this podcast ★

In the News The release of WordPress 5.9 is coming this month. There are many performance enhancements that will be part of this release. In addition to editor and front-end performance enhancements, lazy loading images changed, resulting in a 30% faster page load - in some cases. Go over to make.wordpress.org to check out the numbers. Sarah Gooding, over at the WPTavern covers the new API in Gutenberg that will be released with WordPress 5.9. This new API will allow you to lock individual blocks and override template locking which had been the only way to lock blocks. Events As WordPress 5.9 comes out at the end of January, there is a Mega Meetup to provide information that WordPress professionals should know about. You can sign up for the meetup which will be held Thursday, January 20, 2022. Look for some great exploration of Blocks and what to expect around design changes.  WooCommerce Updates Heads up. Starting with version WooCommerce 6.5 (scheduled for release in May) WooCommerce will require PHP 7.2 or newer to work. PHP is rapidly changing and it was determined that PHP 7.2 was the version that still had a significant number of WooCommerce active installs running. If you have an older version of PHP running it will still work, but you will not be able to continue to update this plugin. You also risk the usual performance and security issues by running older versions. From Our Contributors and Producers There are several more 2021 “year in reviews” from the WordPress community.  Brad Touesnard from Delicious Brains shares a nice post about how the company's growth has tripled and how the team is growing.  He also covers the ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) acquisition along with other updates. The article is worth a few minutes of your time to read. WPCloudDeploy shares the blogpost of how they had 10 versions of their product released in one year. They rolled out more than 50 new and improved features last year. This is a pretty impressive post representing a lot of work from that company.  There is also an update from Rich Tabor. He announced that WP Experts has acquired his Login Designer plugin. Did you know that NFT marketplace aggregator Flip, co-founded by UpOnly podcast host Brian Krogsgard (yes the guy from Post Status), has raised $6.5 million in a seed funding round? What is Flip you ask? Flip aggregates NFT marketplaces under one roof on its platform, allowing users to easily navigate through available NFTs to buy.  Ever wonder why competing with Google search is next to impossible? Well, a new search engine needs an index of the web. And many sites don’t welcome any web crawler that isn’t Google or Bing. This article from Fast Company covers the challenges of competing with search that crawls sites with automated software. Brave, which is a privacy-focused web browser, had seen continued growth in 2021 with 50 million users. The Brave browser does not track your searches or share any identifying data with third-party companies. If you would like to break free from the big companies, you can give them a try. WordPress News is hard to turn into a real business. This week over on the Matt Report Rae Morey shares how she built The Repository newsletter with her background as a journalist. Two Great Segments: The Learn Minute with Hauwa Abashiya Transcript Happy New Year. It's Hauwa Abashiya here from the Make training team here with your Learn WordPress minute. If you're not familiar with Learn WordPress, it is a learning resource on .org for anyone who wants to learn how to use, build for and contribute to WordPress. The Make training team wrangles all the content on Learn and we use the Sprint methodology to determine what we are working on and our timeframe for delivery. This month we are focused on creating content for 5.9 and need your help. We have identified a number of existing lesson plans and workshops that need to be revised, as well as the new features coming to 5.9 that need a corresponding lesson plan and workshop. For the full list see our January 2022 Sprint post on .org, links provided in the show notes. If you're interested in helping create content, leave a comment on the post or drop us a message in the training team Slack channel. We also have some great workshop videos that you can follow. As a reminder, workshops are practical on-demand videos that show viewers what they can do with WordPress. Lesson plans are guides for facilitators to use while presenting at events or within educational environments. Visit make.wordpress.org/training for more information and check out learn.wordpress.org The WooMinute with Bob Dunn Transcript Hey, it's BobWP from Do the Woo, here's your 1-minute of WooCommerce The innovation we see happening with WordPress will reflect directly on WooCommerce. When I asked Matt Mullenweg at the State of the Word to give me some Woo, he said "in 2022, the thing I'm most excited about is embracing Gutenberg and the block interfaces for everything with Woo. Woo still has some ways of doing things which are more tied to the Classic Editor, or shortcodes, or other ways of creating pages. There are some plugins and experiments around Gutenberg and blocks. And I think that I would love if Woo was one of the best plugins in the world for embracing how to use Gutenberg. Then back in September when we had WooCommerce CEO Paul Maiorana on the podcast, he added his insights, "because as we're able to see things like full site editing coming around the corner for WordPress itself, and as we are able to take some of the lessons learned from that and apply them to WooCommerce as a whole, we're going to be able to utilize the lessons learned in just the FSE experience in general, for making that experience great for store owners earlier." So I can safely say, hang on to your hats with Woo in 2022 as I'm sure we are going to see some very cool things playing out. And you can find these conversations and moreover on DotheWoo.io. Thanks for listening. Thanks to all of the members who shared these links today:  Birgit Pauli-HaackLiam DempseyNigel Bahadur ★ Support this podcast ★